Blog

Golden fiver on the block

By Deborah Yaffe, Dec 7 2017 02:00PM

How time flies.

It’s been exactly a year since a Scottish art gallery announced that Graham Short, an artist known for his teeny-tiny masterworks, had engraved miniature portraits of Jane Austen on four Winston Churchill £5 notes.

As blog readers will recall, in a deliberate echo of the Golden Ticket sweepstakes in Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Short spent the notes in cafés throughout Britain and challenged the spending public to find these needles in the currency haystack. Breathless press reports speculated that, based on the prices Short’s earlier work had commanded, the embellished fivers could be worth as much as £50,000 ($67,000).

Given the amount of currency out there, I was skeptical early on that these four prized portraits – Jane Austen in her familiar cap, encircled by a quote from one of her novels – would ever turn up. Then, in relatively short order, three did. Two of the lucky winners decided to keep the notes as souvenirs; the remarkably generous third winner donated her fiver back to the gallery, with a request that it be used “to help young people.”

Tomorrow, that wish will come true, when the fiver – this one bears the Pride and Prejudice quote "To be fond of dancing was a certain step towards falling in love" -- is auctioned off. The auction will benefit BBC Children in Need, a charitable arm of the venerable broadcaster, which makes grants to projects aimed at helping disadvantaged children and youths. Just incidentally, the auction will also provide the first gauge of the Austen fivers’ actual market value, as opposed to their entirely speculative, reporter-determined value.

In July, to commemorate the bicentenary of Austen’s death, Short donated a fifth embellished fiver for display at the Jane Austen Centre in Bath. Meanwhile, one last note remains undiscovered somewhere. Check your piggy banks, Brits: you could have a surprise holiday gift in there.